Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Prodigy’s End

It’s late May, the first week of the French Open, but Donald Young, the onetime Future of American Tennis, is not in Paris. He’s in California, playing in the first round of the Carson Challenger, an obscure second-tier tournament, and he has just double-faulted to give the match’s first break point to Carsten Ball, an Australian ranked No. 802 in the world.

They’re playing at the Home Depot Center, in the shadows of the stadium where the Los Angeles Galaxy professional soccer team plays. Only a handful of fans sitting on folding chairs are watching the tennis here on the site’s center court. The other players don’t seem that interested, either. They’re inside the improvised lounge, which consists of a few sofas and a television, watching Andy Roddick lose another first-round match at the French Open.

Outside, Young adjusts his baseball cap, but he’s not fixing the brim, which is slanted to the side. The hat, like the diamond studs he wears in his ears, is a hip-hop gesture of a sort made by many African-American athletes these days, even tennis players. Young glances across the net. He has beaten this guy twice before, but those matches took place in 2004 and were part of a spectacular run that culminated the following year with Young’s becoming the world’s top-ranked junior at age 15. Ball is now 19, but Young has a history of beating the older players, ever since he first picked up a racket when he was 2. Brad Gilbert, a former Top 5 player best known for coaching Roddick and Andre Agassi, remembers seeing Young win the 12-and-under national championships in 2001. Young was a year younger than most of the field. In that age division, most players hit nothing but topspin moon balls. “But here was this little lefty, who already had a well-rounded game, used lots of spins and wasn’t afraid to come to net,” Gilbert says.

Young tosses the ball in the air and arches his back until it’s almost parallel to the ground, an exaggerated bend reminiscent of Boris Becker’s serve. In one fluid motion, he explodes, uncoiling his wiry 5-foot-10 frame into the serve, which Ball blocks back deep into Young’s court. It’s a rally now, the two lefties exchanging ground strokes. Young is known for his speed, and his skinny legs churn as he scampers along the baseline. He’s hitting all kinds of shots — slices, topspin drives, off-speed loopers — and displaying the versatility that drove his opponents crazy in the juniors. But Ball has grown a few inches since they last met. He’s listed at 6-foot-3 but looks taller, and while he’s not as graceful as Young, he hits the ball as hard as he can, gaining confidence with every shot. Finally, one of Young’s strokes falls short; though the ball lands closer to the baseline than the service line, it’s not deep enough to prevent Ball from stepping in and walloping a two-handed backhand down the line, past Young’s outstretched racket. That makes the score 3-1, and Ball’s powerful serve ensures that the rest of the set is a formality. At its conclusion, the two players take their seats by the umpire’s chair. Ball’s legs are twitching. He’s giddy, ready to resume play. Young has draped a towel across his lap. He stares blankly ahead. “How old is he now?” one spectator asks another. “Fifteen? Sixteen?”

At this moment in May, Young is two months shy of 18. Before he had a learner’s permit, Young had a Nike contract and was saddled with the expectations of returning American men’s tennis to the heights occupied by Agassi, Pete Sampras, Jim Courier and Michael Chang. He was on a path to become the first black men’s champion since Arthur Ashe. And he didn’t dodge the hype. A clip from the Tennis Channel a few years ago, preserved on YouTube, shows Young addressing the camera. He’s 14, with the barest patch of hair above his lip. “Win all the Grand Slams more than once — that’s always been my goal,” he says. He calls Sampras his idol and says he’d like to “maybe surpass what he did or come close.”

But even if he does play at Wimbledon this week, no one will be making comparisons to Sampras, who won seven Wimbledon titles (and a record 14 Grand Slams overall). Because here at the Carson Challenger, Young is ranked No. 335 in the world, and he is losing to a guy almost 500 spots below him, a nobody. As he rises from his chair and picks up his racket to start the second set, the question is not whether Young is the future of American tennis, but whether he has a future in tennis at all.

Has there ever been a bleaker moment in American tennis? On the women’s side, the Williams sisters still show flashes of brilliance — Serena, ranked No. 81 at the time, won the Australian Open earlier this year — but their best tennis is behind them. Have you even heard of another active American women’s player?

As for the men, Roddick is a respectable No. 5 and a winner of the U.S. Open, but he has reached only three Grand Slam finals in the four years since then. James Blake has never made it beyond the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam. Once age and injury bring Roger Federer back down to earth, players like Rafael Nadal (already far ahead of the rest of the pack), Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray, Marcos Baghdatis and Richard Gasquet are ready to supplant him. There are no Americans in sight. Not so long ago, however, Donald Young, younger than all of them, seemed to be the exception.

The script was perfect: Young grew up on the South Side of Chicago and was raised by a couple of tennis fanatics — instructors, in fact. They didn’t force the game on their son, but he showed natural aptitude. At age 3, Young was able to hold rallies over the net. At 10, he hit a few balls with the sport’s most famous lefty, John McEnroe, who told reporters, “He’s the first person I’ve seen who has hands like me.” He dominated his peers and, with endorsements from Nike and Head lined up, turned pro at 14 — an astonishingly early age, but not unprecedented in tennis, especially after the rules were tweaked to allow young professionals to continue to play in the juniors. With his earrings and funky cap, Young brought another look to a men’s sport whose only other memorable sartorial flourishes recently have been stonewashed jeans shorts, worn by Agassi, and the pirate ensemble favored by Nadal. And image wasn’t everything: as a 15-year-old, Young became the youngest player ever to win a junior Grand Slam title, the 2005 Australian Open, and the youngest to hold the world’s top spot in the junior ranking.

His accomplishments generated attention outside the tennis world. Newsweek included Young in its 2005 Who’s Next list of up-and-comers, alongside another rising African-American star, Barack Obama. “There aren’t a lot of obvious bets in tennis,” says Jim Courier, a winner of four Grand Slam titles and the executive producer of “Unstrung,” a new documentary that follows Young and six other top American juniors. “At 15, with what he did, Donald was about as close as you get.”

When Young started playing the elite tournaments of the ATP tour, it figured that a breakthrough would happen soon. Lleyton Hewitt, Michael Chang and Aaron Krickstein won their first ATP titles at 16, and none had a record as a junior that was as sterling as Young’s.

But the script didn’t unfold as expected. In February 2005, in Young’s first ATP outing, in San Jose, Calif., Robby Ginepri, then No. 74 and quickly rising, needed only 50 minutes to beat Young 6-2, 6-2. Two weeks later, in Scottsdale, Ariz., Young lost 6-3, 6-1 to Paul Goldstein, currently ranked No. 95. Over the next year, Young continued to lose, and he now has a record of 0-10 in ATP events. And the matches have not gotten any more competitive. At the 2006 Sony Ericsson Open in Miami last year, he was crushed 6-0, 6-0 by Carlos Berlocq, a journeyman who lost by the same score to James Blake in the next round.

At the time, Young tried to give the impression that he was unfazed by the losses. “I really do think I’m learning something from each match,” he said after the drubbing by Berlocq. But among the tennis cognoscenti, the feeling was that Young has been pushed too hard, too fast. “Psychologically, it’s got to be tough when you’re barely winning games,” Patrick McEnroe, the captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team, says.

But who’s to blame? His parents? Tennis has seen far worse, with its share of maniacal disciplinarians who order 1,000 serves before breakfast, as well as nut jobs like Jelena Dokic’s father, who was thrown out of the 2000 U.S. Open after badgering the staff about the high price of the salmon plate and who said he wanted to drop a nuclear bomb on Sydney after his daughter’s early exit from last year’s Australian Open.

Or was it Young’s management company, IMG? A colossus in the tennis world, the sports-marketing company represents Federer and Nadal, but it doesn’t yet have that most precious of commodities — an active American men’s champion. Was IMG pushing Young too hard, using its muscle to get wild-card entries into top events that his ranking — a lowly 1,253 at the end of 2004 — wouldn’t otherwise qualify him to enter? Shouldn’t he have stuck to the sport’s minor circuit, the Futures and Challengers tournaments, where the total prize money is capped at $15,000 and $150,000 respectively, until he earned a spot in the ATP events alongside the game’s elite?

Photo

Credit
Matthias Clamer

Or is Young just another bust, hyped beyond the level of his talent? A Kwame Brown of the tennis world? The difference is that Brown, the first pick of the N.B.A. draft in 2001, is still being paid $9 million a year for his underachieving, while Young is in Carson fighting for the top prize of $7,200.

“There’s been a lot of negative press put on us playing in some of these ATP events,” Young’s father, Donald Sr., told me. It was a week before the Carson Challenger tournament, and I was visiting the Youngs in Atlanta, where Donald Jr. trains at Tennis in Motion, a tennis facility and training center run by his father. The campus is impressive enough, with more than 20 courts, hard and clay, set on a barren patch of land not far from the airport, but it was virtually empty on that Saturday in May. When I arrived, Donald Sr. was stringing a racket and Young’s mother, Illona, had just brought in pizza for lunch.

The decision to play the big tournaments was in large part a financial decision, Donald Sr. said, and the family wasn’t pushed by IMG. In fact, he wasn’t very happy with the company or Young’s agent, Gary Swain, who set up that now-legendary early practice session with John McEnroe. Neither Swain nor the company, according to Donald Sr., had done enough to market his son, beginning with a missed opportunity when Young became the world’s top junior. “Why couldn’t he have had . . . a two-dollar popsicle deal,” he said, or “a two-dollar bubblegum deal?”

Far-fetched examples, perhaps, but Young’s father had a point: even small endorsement deals can make a difference. After all, tennis, on any level, is expensive. That’s why, like golf, it’s often regarded as a sport for rich kids. Donald Sr. learned this long before his son was born. A Chicago native and the son of a former pro baseball player, he took up tennis at 16 and played for Alabama State. He tried his luck on the minor pro circuit, but it wasn’t much of a living. “I realized you had to have resources, sponsorships to do certain things,” he said.

Young’s mother, who grew up in Missouri, was not allowed to play tennis as a child because it was too expensive, but she fell in love with the sport during college. When she moved to Chicago to work in advertising and later for Fannie Mae, she taught tennis on the side. Donald Sr. and Illona met at a mixed-doubles tournament as opponents but soon realized they would win more matches playing together. “We partnered up, and then we really partnered up,” Illona said.

When their only child showed an early gift for the sport, the Youngs were well aware of the sacrifices, financial and otherwise, that they would have to make to see him reach his potential. Beginning in seventh grade, Young was home-schooled by Illona — she is also a certified teacher — to accommodate a heavy traveling schedule that you don’t see as often in more school-oriented and seasonal sports like football and baseball. The United States Tennis Association contributed yearly grants ranging from $5,000 to $10,000, but they weren’t enough. “You take a kid like Donald, who had a hefty travel schedule, and you’re looking at $30,000 to $40,000 in expenses,” Rodney Harmon, director of the U.S.T.A.’s men’s-tennis program, says. “Plus, you have to double that, since he’s too young to travel on his own.”

Neither the family nor Swain will discuss the size of Young’s endorsements, but his Nike contract, the largest of them, is reported to be significantly smaller than the $2 million deal the company is said to have given Gael Monfils, a young Frenchman of Caribbean descent who is ranked No. 62. Young’s father says only that his son is already making more than most recent college graduates. “They’re lucky if they get thirty, forty thousand,” he said — and Donald is “doing that already.” With the endorsements and the income from Tennis in Motion, the family is comfortable financially, and Illona can travel full time with her son.

Still, the Youngs aren’t rich, which is why accepting the wild cards made sense, Donald Sr. said. “If you had the opportunity to play in a pro event, make 5 or 10 thousand dollars, losing in the first round versus losing in a Future making $137. . . . ” Donald Sr. begin to ask rhetorically, referring to the paltry sums generated by a first-round exit in a Futures tournament. “Your hotel is paid for, you’ve got a car to drive around in. Is there any comparison?”

But at the time, what he didn’t understand was that the losses were exacting a heavy psychological price on his young son.

Young was on the academy’s practice courts, hitting with a college player and a teenage girl — just fooling around, really, before flying out to California in a few days to prepare for the Challenger tournament. When he took a break, we talked briefly and awkwardly, comparing opinions about “Spider-Man 3.” He has dealt with many reporters and seems to have determined that the best way to handle them is to be generous with his smiles and laughter and to say little. At first, even his high speaking voice seems conditioned to appear agreeable. But he’s handsome, naturally charismatic and well mannered, so he comes off as perhaps a tad nervous, but not affected.

The following morning, we sat down in the tennis center, next to the Ping-Pong table. Young had awoken early to catch the end of a tournament final in Hamburg, in which Federer happened to beat Nadal for the first time on clay. Later, he was hoping to make the two-hour drive to the University of Georgia to watch some of the college championships then under way. I recalled my earlier conversation with Harmon of the U.S.T.A, who has known Young for many years. “That’s one thing people don’t realize about Donald,” he told me. “That he really loves the game, loves watching it and appreciates the history.”

So I was surprised to hear Young tell me that the previous year he had thought of giving up the sport entirely.

He had lost plenty of times as a junior, he said, but the losses were always followed by wins and then dominance. Yet the learning curve was steeper at the professional level, and after his dismal start in ATP events, Young found himself for the first time questioning his tennis skills. “I felt like I wasn’t good enough, felt like I should go to school now, just hang it up,” he said. “I didn’t feel I deserved to be in the locker room.”

Meanwhile, Young, so close to his parents, began to push them away. “I wasn’t listening to anyone,” he said. “I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and that was it.” He didn’t feel like traveling. He wanted to hang out with his friends in Atlanta. Briefly, he dated. “It kind of got in the way a little bit,” he said. “Maybe it was the wrong person. I don’t know.” Young wasn’t just trying to find his way as a professional tennis player; he was negotiating his adolescence.

It can be a lonely existence. Jim Courier compares Young’s situation to that of Phil Hughes, the New York Yankees’ young pitcher, who just turned 21. “When you look at Hughes,” Courier says, “you have a whole organization that’s trying to protect him, not bring him up to the majors too fast or have him throw too many pitches. But in tennis, for most young players and their families, they’re winging it, learning as they go.”

Learning as you go is a pretty good description of Young’s game plan in the first round of the Carson Challenger, as he moves Carsten Ball around the court, probing for weaknesses. It has been about a year since Young played in an ATP tournament. Though he has disappeared from the headlines, he has not quit, instead rededicating himself to the minor circuit. Team Young has come to accept what so many others were saying from the wings, a consensus summed up by the American doubles star Mike Bryan. “Most people feel he got too many cards in the show too early,” Bryan wrote in an e-mail message. “Donnie needs to be able to come along at his own pace and play lots of Futures and Challengers. Let him win some of those along the way and get wild cards on the big tour when he’s ready.”

Photo

A Matter of Follow-Through Donald Young practicing his backhand at Tennis in Motion, a tennis academy and training facility outside Atlanta and run by his father and coach, Donald Sr.Credit
Photographs by Matthias Clamer for The New York Times

The first game of the second set against Ball is a marathon. Seven deuces. Young is serving, but he can’t finish off the game. On the fifth deuce, after a passing shot whizzes by him, Young takes a ball from his pocket and slams it into the fence. There’s another long rally before Young rushes the net again. This time, Ball is stretched wide and can muster only a weak floater, which Young blocks easily into the open court. Young has struggled to hold his serve, but it’s Ball who throws his racket to the ground and seems rattled.

A few more players have gathered around the court, now that the television coverage of the French Open is over for the day. Among them is Harel Levy, once a Top 30 player, now plagued by injuries, whom Young beat in April en route to winning his first professional tournament, a Futures event in Arkansas. Levy is speaking Hebrew with a few other Israeli players — all veterans of the ATP tour, hoping for one last run. There are also a few rising prospects present, though none as heralded as Young. Most of the players in Carson will spend the majority of their professional lives on the minor circuit. “Financially, it’s like any other job,” says Rajeev Ram, a former star at the University of Illinois who is ranked No. 175. “We make enough to cover expenses and put a little on the side.”

For Young, it’s not about the money at the moment. He has earned only $14,077 in prize money so far this year, but he has moved up in the rankings, from No. 484 at the end of 2006 to 335 on the eve of the Carson event. His father speaks of “renewal” when describing the current phase of his career. “It really took a while, a lot of talking, to get me to realize I’m still 16 at the time — I turned 17 later that year — to keep working at it,” Young says. “I wasn’t supposed to beat someone 25, 26, who’s been Top 10 in the world before. Just take it all in perspective and keep working. It took a while. It hurt though.”

It’s Ball’s serve, and he quickly goes up 30-love. But his thoughts still appear to be on the previous game, when he had a chance to take control of the match. Young gets a couple of serves back in play, and suddenly Ball’s ground strokes are less sure. He makes three errors in a row and gives the game away.

Young has found his opponent’s weakness. Where his own backhand is an effortless flip of the wrists, an almost sensual movement, Ball’s two-hander is stiff. Young directs the balls to his backhand, taking a little bit off his shots, daring his opponent to go for a winner. Ball misfires again and again. He should try to run around his backhand, but he’s stubborn, incredulous that all of a sudden he can’t hit three in a row. But he can’t, and Young wins the second set 6-2.

The third set is more of the same, punctuated by Ball’s childish outbursts. When Young breaks Ball’s serve to take a 3-1 lead, Ball shouts, “Push, all he does is push,” a taunt you hear frequently in the juniors. There’s a history between these two, Young’s mother tells me. Ball hasn’t spoken to the family since Young, citing an injury, pulled out of playing doubles with him at the Wimbledon Junior Championships.

Losing 5-2, in the last game of the match, Ball directs his frustration at the crowd, specifically a group of African-Americans who he seems to believe are cheering Young a little too boisterously. “Can you please just show a little class?” he yells.

In our conversations, the family never makes a big deal about Young’s race, about his being one of the sport’s few black players. Young and his mother never even mention it. Donald Sr. says he can recall only one incident, long ago, when his son said someone called him a “chocolate drop.”

The racial undertones of Ball’s remark are there if you want to hear them. But the fans just snicker, and Young is unperturbed. Ball makes another error, and the players exchange a perfunctory handshake at the net.

The Carson Challenger was the biggest tournament of Young’s year thus far, his mother says. And Young did well by reaching the semifinals, where he fell to Alex Bogomolov Jr., a former Top 100 player who ended up winning the tournament. The effort improved his ranking by about 50 spots, to No. 288. Still, that wasn’t good enough to ensure entry into Wimbledon, so Young either has to play in the qualifying tournament beforehand or accept another wild card into the main draw. A few wins at a major tournament can produce a big jump in the rankings, but Young is realistic about the likelihood of that happening. And when he talks about his tennis future, Young no longer invokes his idol, Pete Sampras. “Now I don’t weigh myself down with expectations,” he says. “I just want to keep the ranking up.”

Those who have followed Young’s career maintain that his best tennis is ahead of him. “Next time this year, Donald will be in the Top 100,” Courier predicts. It has never been a question of talent, he says, but of whether Young can develop the physical tools to compete with the game’s elite players. A few years ago, much was made of his size 12 1/2 feet, which seemed to promise that Young would go through a growth spurt, like another highly regarded American, the 19-year-old Sam Querrey, who shot up to 6-foot-6, developed a powerful serve and is now ranked No. 80.

The growth spurt may never come. But there have been plenty of champions shorter than 6 feet, including Agassi and Chang; Marcelo Rios, the mercurial Chilean lefty who briefly held the No. 1 ranking in 1998, was almost exactly Young’s size, as is Nikolay Davydenko, the current No. 3. Nonetheless, Young will have to add some muscle to his slender frame. That was apparent against Bogomolov, who is the same height as Young but, at a fully formed 24, carries an extra 10 pounds or so of muscle, which he put to good use. In the juniors, Young was more of an attacking player, charging the net at every opportunity. But he’s not strong enough to press the action on the pro circuit and has evolved into more of a counterpuncher, relying on his speed.

Patrick McEnroe also says that Young would be better served practicing more often with top-caliber players, eliminating the horse-around days with friends. Earlier this year, McEnroe invited Young to practice with the Davis Cup squad — Andy Roddick, James Blake and the Bryan brothers, Mike and Bob — and he pushed Young to step up his game. “At one point, I asked him to hit every ball as hard as he could,” McEnroe says. “And he did, and they were still going in.” A few weeks later, Young flew to Texas to train with Roddick and his coach, Jimmy Connors. The experiences have helped him regain confidence, Young says. “Hearing some of the stories, hearing what they went through to make it, I think that’s helped out a lot.”

Still, he has a long way to go if he’s struggling against the likes of Bogomolov, who is by no means one of the tour’s hardest hitters. But for the first time in his life, Young doesn’t appear to be in a rush. “If I’m Top 100 for five to six years, I feel that’s pretty good, because not too many people get to do that,” he says. “That’s not my ultimate goal, I still want better, but if that’s what happens, that’s what happens.”

The Ball match is over, and Young and his mother are milling around the court, talking to fans and acquaintances. There are no television cameras or young girls seeking autographs. It isn’t the French Open, after all, where the story of the day is how all eight American men lost in the first round.

Young excuses himself and walks down the long road to the parking lot. Ever the courteous son, he’s going to get the car and come back to pick up his mother. He brakes as he sees me walk by, and we talk for a minute about the match. “I’m glad you at least got to see me win,” he says. There is that smile again, and those chuckles.

But my lasting impression of Young came a few minutes earlier, on match point, after his opponent’s final errant backhand. There was a shout: “Come on.” I didn’t recognize the voice, deep and gravelly, and did a double take. But it was him all right. When Donald Young yells, he sounds like a man.

Paul Wachter lives in New York and contributes to The Nation and Tennis Magazine, among other publications.